Like many who read this post, Discord was a platform that served many purposes. For me it was connecting with my friends, to talking about school affairs, to learning how to program.
Unfortunately, due to Discord’s policy of age verification, and the general enshittification of Discord, I ultimately must delete my account in order to have privacy and security, along with other reasons.
More will be explained below, but I think first, a small history of my usage of Discord is in order.
Warning: What follows is a mostly incoherent rant about several things that pertain to what I am doing today. Read at your own caution.
I first obtained Discord for an extracurricular activity in 2020, as that was during the pandemic and we needed someway to maintain communication channels.
My first activity from what I can remember is quite limited, and I would usually just talk in that server.Then I started using to talk to a friend of mine in another state. And from there, my anchor into the chat platform known as Discord had begun.
I then began to venture onto public servers. The first one that I have memories of joining is the Python Discord Server, a very nice one that was nice and gave me yet another reason to use Discord: for education.
The Python Discord Server was just the beginning, and yet the real reason for why I stayed on Discord wasn’t there yet: the discord.py server.
This is a server in which I have quite fond memories. I seriously learnt how to program here, my first major project, making a discord bot, was done here, and I made several friends whom I still talk with to this day. The impact that this library and this server made on my life cannot be understated.
At first, it was quite rosy. Yes, there was a learning curve. Yes, I got berated several times for silly mistakes, but yet, I learned. I learned how to look up stuff, read documentation, read errors, all the basic skills a developer needs for any project. In short, my programming skills are the way they are today because of Discord. If it were not for the opportunity to make a discord bot, I severely doubt I would have stuck with programming for so long.
And yet, it was through this method, learning about Discord and its API, that I began to also see the cracks in this platform, from the inconsistent support across platforms to the woeful communication with developers.
For a good summary, read this gist Danny, the maintainer of discord.py, wrote on why he stopped development of discord.py in 2021 (Note: he picked it up again in 2022, but the reasons were valid at the time).
That being said, my interactions with discord.py did set the stage for how I could continue to view every single decision Discord made in the future.
Let’s get some stuff out of the way: Discord has been VC (venture capital) funded since at least 2020, from a very cursory search. The issue with VC money is while it seems like good money in the now, these same companies that pour money into startups eventually want a return on their investment.
For Discord, the main source of monetization is Nitro. They have been consistently making updates and changes to Nitro, in order to try and get people to sign up, with changes that feel nothing like superfluous. Stuff like, rainbow gradients, custom fonts, and profile background/animation are all fluff that add no value to the chat platform. In fact, basic theming is locked behind nitro. The fact of the matter is I have to use uBlock Origin filters that a friend of mine made just in order to have a sane experience on discord post 2023-2024.
Discord has quite inane side quests too. Throwback to the time that they tried getting NFTs onto the platform and trying and failing to hop onto the AI LLM hype train.
All of this while the core experience is barely usable, with a desktop app that needs to restart in order to not use too much memory, and a (thankfully patched) scuffed mobile UI update that was inaccessible.
The pattern of Discord is one of trying and failing to do various things in order to make themselves profitable, while letting the core rot away, as they try to add more flashy things just to get more nitro subs.
The fact that none of the additions made post 2022 have added any meaningful change to how I use Discord speaks volume. In fact, I have to go out of my way to remove things, just so I can maintain some semblance of sanity.
In January of this year, I saw that Discord was going to apparently file for an IPO in March. I saw the end was near. I set an ultimatum to get off the platform before then.
Then the age verification dropped. The infrastructure that was set in place for the UK’s Online Safety Act and Australia’s social media ban was going to be used globally, they said.
Cue the most panic I have ever seen on my life. Stoat’s servers crashed, a matrix server I was one said they get 500+ users post 2026-02-09, and heck, Teamspeak, Discord’s rival, buckled as well.
I honestly have no idea what Discord was thinking. Age verification with your face is one of the most privacy invasive steps on the internet on top of an already extensively built surveillance apparatus. Combine this with the fact that Discord had a breach of 70,000 IDs in October of 2025, and the fact that they partnered with Persona, a Peter Thiel-backed corporation that is in bed with the US government, shows how Discord cannot be trusted with their 3rd party age verification providers. There is so much more I could write here, but honestly, the EFF did a way better job than I ever could. Read their article here. Click through the links in this article, it has several good reasons for why age verification, especially with AI algorithims, are a disaster that should never have been allowed in the first place.
Additionally, one thing that seems to have gone under the radar is that they are using AI to check the age of your messages. This puts me at unease so much, and while I knew this was a thing for a while, seeing this in light of recent events does not make me confident.
Note: I know that a couple of days ago, Discord said they are delaying age verification until the second half of 2026. Note that this is only a delay. The people who work at Discord clearly cannot read the room and see how much people hate this, for good reason. If they actually did, they would scrap any and all plans for age verificaiton. Alas, I cannot trust Discord anymore. It is too late. The slow and inevitable decline was long delayed, and I have no faith. If you value communication, get off of Discord as soon as you can.
This is a question that I see everyone asking. Everyone and their dog has a discord alternative that they used. Honestly, this must have been what the old internet felt like with 15 morbillion chat platforms?, and I love it.
insert poob template meme here
Anyways, I recommend Stoat. It has been long enough that I can vouch for its stability and reliability. I also know a few of the developers, and they are quite good people. I trust stoat in the future.
If you want something one-on-one with your friends, look no further than Signal. End to end encrypted, audited consistently, and a UX that just works, no questions asked.
Anyways, thanks for all the fish, Discord. You filled a void in my teenage years that can never be replaced, but it wasn’t the platform so much as it was the people.
Don’t let chat platforms hold your relationships hostage. If you can, self-host something. Own your data.
These are all great articles that go extensively into depth about chat alternatives than I ever could, go read them.